Syracuse, N.Y. -- That there were some 12,000 empty seats (in a small building, no less) on Saturday night in the Carrier Dome for the Syracuse University football team’s home opener was discouraging enough.

But when so many of the 37,758 who’d filed into the joint began to flee it in the fourth quarter . . . well, that was borderline stupefying.

OK, fine. The Maine Black Bears were not Rockne’s Irish. In fact, because they’d earlier lost to Albany -- by a score of 3-0, no less -- they were much closer to your bakery’s Danish. But they were the visiting squad, and so often of late the visiting squad has had its way in the Dome against the Orange.

Given those sorry past results, then, you might have assumed that the locals would have wanted to stay throughout all of SU’s eventual 38-14 victory, savoring the thing for as long as possible. After all, in 2008, the Orange won only twice in the Dome. And in both ’07 and ’05, it had triumphed just once. As such, bearing witness to home victories in this town has been challenging.

But no matter. Even as Doug Marrone's outfit was pummeling the poor Black Bears, even while Ryan Nassib was tossing those school-record five touchdown passes, even with the chance to see the Syracuse club improve to 2-1 for only the third time in 11 seasons . . . even with all of that, a goodly number of fans up and left the building.

And it kind of made a person wonder: Just what is on the minds of Central New York's good burghers, anyway?

For so long, the mantra had been: “We want a winning team, and we want one that’ll take advantage of the fast track inside the Dome and score points.” But when the citizenry was given exactly that on Saturday -- in the home opener, to boot -- it suddenly became more important to beat the crowd out onto the streets than it was to watch a smidge of history.

Remember, the Orange hadn’t won its first home game since 2005, losing to Iowa (’06), Washington (’07), Akron (’08) and Minnesota (’09) in the interim. Which means you’d have thought folks would have chosen to stick around to the end this time. But, you’d have thought wrong because off so many of them went, leaving the final horn to be saluted by rows and rows of empty pews.

Certainly, the customer is always right. But that doesn’t mean the customer can’t also be periodically harder to explain than Bjork’s wardrobe. Such was the case on Saturday evening at the Carrier Dome when some 12,000 empty seats became, oh, some 40,000 empty seats with time remaining on the clock.

Such was the case on Opening Night when the rational among us gazed upon the mostly-vacated playpen and were left to muster this single word: “Huh?”

(Bud Poliquin’s column, his “To The Point” observations and his freshly-written on-line commentaries appear virtually every day on syracuse.com. His work also regularly appears on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. Additionally, he can be heard Mondays through Fridays (10 a.m.-12 noon), on the “Bud & the Manchild” sports-talk radio show on The Score 1260-AM. E-mail: bpoliquin@syracuse.com.)